5, 10-paise coins help Mysuru tea vendor track his debtors

TNN | Updated:

We have done away with 5, 10, 20, 25 paise coins, but they can be found in large numbers at a tea stall on Chamaraja Double Road.

MYSURU: We have done away with 5, 10, 20, 25 paise coins, but they can be found in large numbers at a tea stall on Chamaraja Double Road. Shop owner Shivanna, 62, cannot go about his business without them. He uses them to keep track of how much his customers owe him.
As shops, vendors and commercial establishments form a major section of his customers, they often pay Shivanna only at the end of the day or at the end of the week after buying on credit the whole time. Shivanna feels keeping an accounts book is time consuming, so he evolved his own style of abacus, where one paise stands for one rupee.

His system is simple: One pile of coin stands for a particular customer and he keeps on adding coins as the customer buys tea/coffee or snacks on credit. As a result, his stall is dotted with several small pile-ups. The only, or the biggest, challenge is to remember which pile stands for which customer.

However, that's something easy for Shivanna. Though, the stall serves around 50-600 customers a day, not all buy on credit.

Explaining his method and his experience, Shivanna said, "When I started this business more than 30 years ago, I used this method to avoid writing balance amounts in account books to save time. Unknowingly, I slowly started remembering the balance and credits of customers just by looking at the coins."

When asked about customers who try to cheat him, he said, "Yes, there are people who try to cheat me by finding fault with the system of keeping accounts. But only very few are like that. Even then, I continue my system with the hope that they will surely pay."

Shivanna has two sons who are also experts in remembering accounts of customers by looking at the coins.

One of Shivanna's regular customers, Manjunath, 37, said, "It's a better way than to keep writing all the names and balance amounts. However, this may not suit all. I used to have tea her on credit whenever I didn't have the exact change, but would pay within a week."

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